Day 3333 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 11:2 NIV

Of all the many things we’ve gotten wrong and wrapped around and tangled up and inside out here inside these lives lived upside down, perhaps our thinking wisdom is to be found within us might be the worst of the lot.

For there’s been this war raging between pride and humility since God placed humanity upon this scene within which we’ve screamed toward the gross committing of the kind of crime that’s defined our time in a way only described as disgrace. Indeed, though our pride admit it not, the truth is that each of us have lived a way most utterly defiant against His design via designing our own dreams into these ideals that we think at least rival if not best His benevolence.

Yes, we are in every way a people prone to pride and the downfall we see is the demand of such a disdain for the One from whom we came.

Because the simplicity of humility says that none can appreciate anything should they grow inside an entitlement which says they’re due all that they dream themselves into deserving. And that it by all accounts the life we’ve come to choose. We each blast through our days writing wrongs that win for us awards our arrogance is adamant to experience. In fact, the vast course of a life’s experience anymore is merely whatever a person might imagine for themselves.

We literally live sight first following the feet beneath us, which eventually causes us to believe the world beneath us, and so too all those pitiable souls who don’t dare to dream as large as we choose to do. Such is the stance of almost all of society these days. That everyone outside a self is someone to be ashamed of as none other seems to have the visionary acuity that affords us the ability to claim for ourselves a best life that nobody else cares to live.

And that none other seems interested in winning the way of life for which we’re working and weary, well, such only proves to pride that we’re right and the millions of others doing it differently are wrong. Which leaves us unwilling and thus incapable of learning to live beyond ourselves where true freedom waits to be found. For if freedom is truly, as many believe, merely a making of a person’s ideals come true, then freedom is a subjective frailty that I don’t think any of us dare to agree to.

Because if freedom, if wisdom, if honesty and modesty and even identity are all as many claim and just a matter of whatever an individual happens to make of them, then they mean nothing. Because nothing can mean anything if it means something different to everyone.

Which is the danger of a life lived pursing pride at the inevitable expense of never knowing humility. Because contrary to what many seem to assume, the two are not the best of bunkmates. Pride and humility cannot co-reside inside a person. A heart simply isn’t big enough to house both humility and its enemy. Or, taking a quick sidestep, is it that we’ve never cared to understand such enmity as that which must exist between pride and humility?

In fact I fear that many of our failings and the foolishness which inspires us to hide them or deny them is indeed done only out of this socialized assumption that understanding enmity is somehow unbecoming of humanity. We live in a world that lives as if war is just wrong, fighting unacceptable, disagreement even something that shouldn’t be done. No, everyone down here has decided upon what is right from within their own particular percentage of spiritual blindness, and having found their truth, everyone else is wrong.

But the true tragedy within that frame of mindlessness is what can be learned if we know ourselves always right?

What can we find that we’ve never imagined before if our imaginations are singed inside this assumption that we already know the best of everything? How can we grow if we agree with the mindset of most which says we simply don’t need to? In fact, and going deeper as I like to do, what can God teach us if we’ve become a people so prideful that we’ve lost the ability to learn?

For that is the outcome of pride, is it not? Pride teaches us that we’ve got nothing left to know as we’ve come to the very pinnacle of personal perception having found our perfect from within the mediocrity of life lived within the temporality of this mortal reality. It reminds us incessantly that we can cease accepting advice or input as we’ve nothing left we need to know. No, we’ve arrived at the very epitome of human ability here in this life lived knowing we know all we need to.

But friends, what beyond that? What is there beyond that line where we stop looking for the learning of more inside this life of endless reminders that we’ve made more mistakes than anything? What can come our way when our way goes only one way? And most shaking of all, what can we ever know of the Way when our way stays in the way of our coming away from this way in which we’ve wanted everything but to lose sight of everything we’ve wanted as defined by our assumption of life’s need to go our way?

Lately I’ve shared a bit more than I usually do of my own walk and the many ways in which I’ve wrecked and wreaked havoc inside this heart I long assumed my own. How dare I be who I’ve been! And having been such a stupidity as a self following itself only as far as said self could assume I could go, I don’t know if this is even humility I feel these days, or if it’s just a hatred of the harm I’ve done mostly to myself, maybe even to others.

That’s the gravity of ungraciousness that I feel the need to try and warn against every day at this point. Because crushing just isn’t the word for it. No, looking back upon my past and seeing what all I did to it, I just can’t help but notice anything that gives me any more reason to boast as I always did before. Indeed, I’ve lived as if the king of my own life, always knowing what was right for me and never listening to anyone else say my right might be wrong.

Didn’t want to hear it. No, turns out I had to feel it.

That’s the disgrace demanded of a life given to following pride. It unwittingly and yet so willingly almost aches to be proven wrong as if such can’t happen. But friends, it can. Not only can it, but it will. Pride will prove us wrong simply because we are human and inside these human limitations we simply do not have the luxury of ever coming to the legitimization of our expectation of our knowing enough to actually not need help to find what is simply supposed to remain beyond us.

Life is supposed to lived beyond us, beyond here, even beyond what we know of hope as how can we possibly know what hope is when we can’t even begin to wrap our minds around what we still think probably impossible?

Such is the inevitability of pride’s vanity always telling us that we know the outcome before we ever even start to imagine the possibility that we don’t. No matter what might be truly plausible, potentially possible, even perfectly proven, if pride says otherwise, well then it just doesn’t matter how immutable the evidence. If it says something that disagrees with our notions preconceived, we’ll simply not have it and thus not hear it and forever seek to hide from it.

Because deep down pride knows its own fragility, and such is why pride fights so hard to protect itself. Pride is the epitome of all other glass houses, and yet as prideful as we’ve become, so too are we often the first to throw stones trying to knock the splinters out of the eyes of those we feel below us.

And if done enough, as we all already have, all we’ll find is that we’ll eventually destroy ourselves for sake of trying to defend what we’ve allowed to be made of ourselves.

Again, I don’t know if any of this is said from a heart hungry for humility or if, as in plenty of times passed, if it’s just another way of my fooling myself into thinking I’m something I’m not. Because the truth is that I want only humility in life going forward. I want only the opportunity to give my life as some sort of service unto the One who came to save me from the selfishness I’ve served, and can save others from the same.

I just want to spend these last remaining hours aimed at honoring God alone as I believe that such is the truest best hope of a life we can’t keep.

But knowing how many years I didn’t care for that to be my hope, I wrestle endlessly with this wondering as to whether or not I’m anywhere close to anything that could even accidentally be seen as acceptable before the One I always ignored.

Yes, that’s the life I lived for a long time. I long thought that I had the means, the making, the material to manifest life’s meaning. That I could force the future to unfold favorably in accord with this arrogance I never knew was guiding my life off the rails into such peril as personal preference. Indeed, almost all of life anymore is merely a matter of preference as proven in opinion and the pursuing then protecting of profit found or felt in popular opinion or even just personal appeasement.

And for much of my life I’ve lived in line behind this world’s rushing to the assumptions we all uniquely and yet universally expect to soothe our expectations. I can’t even begin to count the days I sat down to design a life lived as full of all I wanted and likewise as free from all I didn’t as I could imagine at the time. But suddenly something strange has dawned on me lately and that is that times change and were our greatest of expectations always reliant upon our knowing truly what was indeed to be the very best for us, the changing tendency of life proves tomorrow an inescapable mystery we’re unable to unravel as we’ve simply not lived tomorrow as of today.

That’s the danger of living outside of humility’s allowing us to see beyond ourselves. It forces us to remain within ourselves and thus limited to the best we ourselves can imagine. And having had plenty of the best I could imagine, I can’t help now but to imagine that the true best of God’s intentions are to be found well beyond my own pitiable attempt to be Him or better Him. Because how can I know what is the best there is when I still can’t say that I know Him as I so desperately desire?

So many nights I lay awake wishing I had started this journey 10 years sooner, 20 years prior, 30 if such were at all possible. But from 6 to here at 36, I’ve seldom had the courage to rage beyond my pride’s barricade. I wanted only to know that I knew enough so that I wouldn’t have to try anymore, so that I wouldn’t need to hurt anymore, so that I wouldn’t need anyone’s help nor feel the need to help anyone anymore. No, everyone can help themselves as we all share the same pride which defines for us all everything we want life to be.

Yes, pride says that everyone else can help themselves, freeing us to follow our selfishness to wherever we’ve yet to go but already insist we’ve always known.

But what scares me more than most things anymore is wondering about all I haven’t known. What of God haven’t I learned? What of His hope, that home of Heaven haven’t I imagined as I worked my soul to the soil seeking to set a foundation here for my own kingdom? What of Christ can’t I see behind eyes so blind from building that kingdom that didn’t need Him on the throne? What of tomorrow is still an expectation that leaves me unable to live today as if it might be my last?

Perhaps, as most say, it isn’t wise to ask such things as they only bring us down. But, and as I’ve personally come to surmise, maybe only the wise do ask those things so that we are brought down to where we need to be as opposed to staying where we know we can’t stay. Maybe that’s the gravity of wisdom always waiting just beyond what we already know or assume known. Maybe it’s such that sort of difficulty that prevents humanity from the hope of humility.

Because we do indeed seem quite the hopeless horde anymore. Combine that honesty with the reality that wisdom is as scarcely sought as it’s always been and it seems we’ve found the reason for the breaking we’re becoming.

And maybe it’s a bit more of my selfishness shining through, but personally, I don’t want to face the sort of breaking this world is headed for because I know I can’t survive on my own what He said is coming. Yet perhaps that’s the point, that we’re not supposed to do this as if we can do it alone. No, maybe salvation is supposed to inspire the humility that reminds us we can’t do what He already did.

But maybe that’s why He did it, so that in Him we’d find the wisdom to seek humility before the destruction of disgrace renders the grave a hope finally found on only the wrong side of eternity.

Yes, perhaps we can allow Him to teach us how to hope now for the loss of our selfishness in exchange for the humility that refuses to settle for a life lost to assumption of our staying here while we still have the hope of Heaven. Because that hope won’t be around forever, and so maybe we should seek the humility that lets us hope it in far sooner than pride ever would.

No, friends please don’t let humility remain an afterthought as one day we won’t have the luxury of assuming we have more time to change that.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold